Gonta

Nikolai and Alexei built Gonta with their own hands. Years later, they discovered that getting her back would be considerably more difficult.

Gonta was a racing yacht built in Kiev for a Soviet-era factory director and eventually shipped to Australia. Then plans changed. The director moved on with his life, while the boat remained on the other side of the world.

Nikolai did not forget.

Years later, over drinks in a Kiev pub, he finally persuaded Alexei that they should go and get her. They crossed Siberia by train, found work aboard a fishing vessel bound for remote southern waters, and eventually reached Australia.

There they encountered Australian fisheries authorities, received help from an oyster grower, found Gonta and began the difficult work of making their neglected boat seaworthy again.

Getting to Australia, it turned out, was only half the problem.

To bring Gonta home they still had the Southern Ocean ahead of them, followed by a long passage toward the Suez Canal and Ukraine. They had limited resources, complicated paperwork and a remarkable ability to find new problems just as the old ones appeared to be solved.

Gonta is an illustrated narrative based on a true story about two Kiev shipwrights who crossed half the world for a boat they had built and never stopped thinking of as their own.

Gonta eventually reaches Odessa. Nikolai and Alexei return to the Kiev pub where the whole idea began. There is only one small problem left: after everything they have done, the yacht still isn't legally theirs.

Gonta also appears in Alex Frishberg's collection A Foreign Affair and Other Stories.